I am potentially erring here by not testing this myself, but is there some idiosyncrasy to the Gemini that make it so one can't just use old friends such as adb and fastboot to perform tasks such as adding a new recovery tool (twrp and friends), unlocking the bootloader (fastbook oem unlock) etc.

Does one *have* to use the mediatec flash tool? On my nexus tablet I've never needed anything other than the android developer kit.

Again, not trying to be snarky, just curious. In my specific case, it is a pain to get the flash_tool running as my linux distro (QubesOS) has security limits on what a USB device can and cannot do which interfere with using the flash tool.